Today's on-line "The American Interest" carries a greatly expanded version of my blog of Feb. 25 (scroll down for Shostakovich and Ives): Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should – and also ponder a kindred question: the function of culture in the life of a nation.  The online products of the Berlin Philharmonic include a $230 box set containing 22 … [Read more...]

Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtwangler’s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should. About a year ago, the Berlin Philharmonic issued a $250 box containing 22 CDs and a 180-page booklet. The contents comprise the complete surviving Furtwangler wartime broadcasts (1939-1945) in the best possible sound. Since most of these performances were recorded with magnetic tape (unprecedented at the time), the dynamic … [Read more...]

For this weekend's "Wall Street Journal" I have written an impassioned encomium for William Dawson's thrilling "Negro Folk Symphony" of 1934 -- still (alas) buried treasure: William Dawson In 1926 the African-American poet Langston Hughes wrote a seminal Harlem Renaissance essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The mountain “standing in the way of any true Negro art in America,” he declared, was an urge “toward whiteness,” a “desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little … [Read more...]

Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987, it was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.” Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” Bloom’s salvo attacked from the right. It was less a polemic than a closely reasoned argument fortified with lofty philosophic learning and grounded classroom experience.  My copy of The Closing of the … [Read more...]

During the cultural Cold War, President John F. Kennedy delivered eloquent speeches claiming that only “free societies” fostered great creative art. But no one scanning centuries of Western literature and music could possibly believe that. Among countless counter-examples was the Soviet Union at that very moment. Its film-makers included Tarkovsky, its poets Akhmatova, its novelists Solzhenitsyn, its composers Shostakovich -- all of whom were acclaimed in the West as of 1963, the year of Kennedy's most ambitious cultural pronouncements. A … [Read more...]

PostClassical Ensemble’s “Cultural Fusion: The Gamelan Experience,” presented on January 23, 2019, at the Washington National Cathedral, was just named THE BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC EVENT of 2019 by Washington Classical Review. To hear extended excerpts from this one-of-a-kind event -- featuring Javanese and Balinese gamelans, and surveying more than a century of gamelan-inspired concert works – click here. To read a pertinent blog, click here. To read what Sudip Bose had to say in The American Scholar, read on: “I finally heard both a … [Read more...]

The Bolshoi Theatre The formidable Norwegian soprano Lisa Davidsen, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, is right now New York’s most talked about opera singer. I caught the final performance in the run, on December 21 – and discovered myself mainly thinking about the Bolshoi Opera’s historic four-week New York season of 1975. The Bolshoi was a throwback to the days of ensemble opera – before airplanes. As of 1975 everything was still sung in Russian. Everyone more or less stayed put in Moscow, sharing … [Read more...]

“America’s forbidden composer” is Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), leader of the “Indianists” movement in music. As I’ve discussed in a recent blog: politically, Farwell seems hopelessly incorrect today. But impressions of Farwell, insofar as they endure, are typically misimpressions. His significance is not merely historical. He composed some of the most original and compelling American piano, choral, and chamber music of the early twentieth century. Two new PostClassical Ensemble webcasts make it possible to actually listen to top-notch Farwell … [Read more...]

Curtain call for “Porgy and Bess” with Rouben Mamoulian in glasses The latest installment of Conrad L. Osborne’s indispensable opera blog takes stock of Porgy and Bess and the Met’s acclaimed new production. It also graciously plugs my own recent series of Porgy blogs in this space, my American Scholar review of the Met Porgy, and my book (“On My Way” – the Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess”) about this opera’s complex and illuminating genesis. To my ears, Porgy and Bess is the highest … [Read more...]